The Port Ellen 32 Year 2015 Limited Edition

50 ml Watson's "elevenses" mini

Tasting notes:I’m going to walk you through a meditation on this whisky. Breathe deeply and slowly. You’re sitting in an opium den in London around the time in which the original Sherlock Holmes Mysteries were set. Now you’re entering a private room in that den with pleated fabric on the ceiling and walls like in Elvis’ pool room, and there’s a huge ornamented hookah in the middle of it. Smell the peaty, sugary awesomeness gurgling inside of the water jar. Approach the beautiful device, and inhale the notes of burnt green willow bark hovering around it. As you raise the hose tip to your lips, you get the lime zest playing in the high register of your olfactory bulb. Breathe it in again…and exhale. Good, that’s the nose portion of this meditation.

Now take a massive drag from that hookah and feel the bright and enormously peaty full bake take over you. Then a flash of revelation hits you: what you just smoked must have been your lone houseplant, your fern, Verne. But it was Verne preserved in liquid amber, or maybe it had just been fossilized next to an overstuffed trilobite who had been lucky enough to have had a brilliantly large and tasty last meal seconds before the meteor hit. And then Verne was pulverized into a fine powder and inserted, via a pastry bag fashioned from grenadilla skins, into the heart of the hookah to produce that liquid from which you just took a drag. You taste it, and it’s is smooth and light and has no discernible wood in it. Another deep breath, a full exhale, and with that mental image, you have the mouth section.

Finally, you open your mouth slightly only to have a spontaneous combustion go off on the middle of your tongue: a solar flare that leaves gravity waves rippling across your palate, and that rips you out of that opium den, through a rift in space/time like you were Bill or Ted amidst excellent adventures. As you flash through the wormhole, you inhale dandelion seeds, only to find that they’re actually tiny angels. You watch the bright lights flash as you hurtle through space and time. You do not want this part of the trip to end, but end it will, and sad as it is to say, when this finish ends, you’ll be back outside the Circle K. Now open your eyes.

Rating:

On the scale of Sherlock Holmes mysteries–
The Port Ellen 32 Year 2015 Limited Release is “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”–Narrated by and told from the perspective of Holmes himself, it gives the reader a unique opportunity to know what it’s like to be inside Sherlock’s head, which is one hell of a place to be.